


Duet

by linguamortua



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Awkward Romance, Blow Jobs, First Time Blow Jobs, Friendship is Magic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:42:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25194121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: It takes two to tango, as they say.
Relationships: Jean-Baptiste Augustin/Sigma | Siebren de Kuiper
Comments: 9
Kudos: 56





	Duet

**Author's Note:**

> For Suz.

The solution, Siebren was delighted to realise, was duct tape.

‘How remarkable,’ he said quietly, spooling a short piece off the roll and tearing it. Folded in half with the sticky side out and pressed to the back of the music stand, it served its purpose admirably. Siebren tried to wiggle the stand around. It held firm.

With a flourish, he put his Rachmaninoff back and spread his fingers on the keys.

Strange, how his hosts could offer him the most advanced technology and the finest laboratory Siebren had ever had the privilege of working in, but in the end it was humble duct tape that saved the day. A pleasing absurdity. 

Siebren gently pressed the first chord and then the second. He played them over a few times, feeling their unique shape, their colour, their flavour. How lucky he was to have such a fine piano. He had missed the sound of a well-tuned instrument. The tactile joy of playing. 

He took a deep breath as though he were about to sing, and launched into the strong, deep chords that broke and rippled into waves and trills. 

‘Do you take requests?’

Siebren spun around on the piano bench. Leaning in the doorway, grinning insolently, was Jean-Baptiste. He always seemed to be around, Siebren thought, smiling, saying things that were half-funny and half-confusing.

‘What kind of a request?’ Siebren asked.

‘Something to dance to? A merengue?’ Jean-Baptiste had an orange in his hands and he was gently peeling the skin away with his thumbs. Siebren watched him do it for a moment, feeling peeled, like the orange.

‘Well…’ Siebren looked down at his hands, resting on the keys. He moved them back and forth uncertainly. He knew a waltz or a rumba. ‘Perhaps, a little like—’ He pecked a few notes but the melody didn’t come to him. Nowadays, things escaped him. Where he should have memories, there were tiny lacunae. Sometimes he didn't know a thing was gone until he looked for it and found himself bereft. ‘I’m sorry, Jean-Baptiste.’

‘It’s just Baptiste, Dr de Kuiper.’

‘It’s just Siebren, then.’

Baptiste nodded and walked into the room, shucking the orange out of its skin and dropping the peel in the trash. He sat down on the edge of the piano bench next to Siebren.

‘You don’t mind some company?’

‘On the contrary. I like it.’ Siebren tried to smile normally. How strange it was, to be so aware of the minutiae of interactions like this. He was sure that he used to be able to talk to people without feeling like some peculiar automaton. But Baptiste didn’t seem to mind. He offered Siebren a slice of orange, the whole fruit fanned out in an elegant circle. ‘Thank you.’

‘Welcome.’ Baptiste reached one hand onto the piano, where Siebren’s left hand still hovered. ‘I’d offer to duet, but I was always a better dancer than musician.’ He pressed a dissonant little chord.

‘Well, I can’t dance, so—’ began Siebren. His sentence trailed off. There was no logical ending to it. 

‘I see you in here a lot,’ Baptiste prompted, rescuing him.

‘Yes, yes. I like to play. It’s calming.’ 

‘I’m sorry you’re stressed. They’re asking a lot of you.’ The orange was gone already. Baptiste put a hand on the back of the bench, leaning in a little. The room was air conditioned and Siebren was chilly. He felt Baptiste’s body heat all down his right arm and side. 

‘They ask a lot of all of us. The rigors of science are—well, universal. You should try the university system.’

‘Med school was enough academia for me.’

‘You didn’t enjoy it?’

‘It was a means to an end.’ Baptiste laughed. ‘I liked the social life.’

‘Ah, an extrovert.’

‘You’re not?’

‘Not especially.’ Siebren looked intently at his sheet music for a moment. ‘But, well, loneliness—that’s something else entirely.’

‘Need a friend?’

‘Maybe. Yes.’

‘Aren’t we friends already?’ Baptiste smiled; Siebren could see it out of the corner of his right eye. To look directly was like looking at the sun. Baptiste’s teeth were very white and his eyes creased as if he was hearing the best joke in the world. Siebren hoped he wasn’t the joke.

‘I hope so, Jean-Baptiste. Baptiste.’

‘We talk a lot, right? In the cafe, in the gym, after briefings.’

They did talk, it was true. Baptiste seemed to show up a lot. Well, or maybe it was that both of them spent a lot of time in the gym. At yet, sometimes Siebren felt as though he didn’t really know the doctor. With other people around, Baptiste always seemed to be drawing everyone else’s attention. That wasn’t surprising. He was a beautiful man. Siebren was well past middle-aged, and he had had some strange experiences recently, and Talon was a new environment for him. But he wasn’t blind. 

‘We do. I think I like you better this way, though,’ said Siebren, and then closed his eyes in mortification. ‘Sorry. That was very rude.’

‘What way?’ Baptiste didn’t sound at all offended, which was out of the usual. Siebren was always offending people with his ways. 

‘I don’t know. It’s easier for me to talk to one person at a time. I’m not myself these days.’

‘You used to run a research laboratory, so I hear.’

‘I did. I did. It was a different time. Forgive me, I’m always making it hard to get to know people.’

‘It’s not hard to be around you. Although you do apologise a lot. Never apologise, that’s my motto. Let people take you or leave you.’

‘The problem is that when one does that, they do tend to leave you.’

Baptiste played another aimless chord. He tiptoed his fingers over the back of Siebren’s right hand, which had somehow found its way back to the piano keys. It tickled. Baptiste gently rested his hand over Siebren’s.

‘You know,’ he said, very casually, ‘I usually find it easier to seduce people.’

Siebren played a horrendous collection of notes by accident.

‘Excuse me, Jean-Baptiste—’

‘I like to make friends,’ Baptiste continued. He ran his hand up Siebren’s wrist. ‘I could be very friendly, if you’d let me.’

Siebren would have liked to make a speech about the ethics of romantic involvement with coworkers. There was a scientific metaphor, there—something about space, and electrons, and distance. Gravity, perhaps. Instead he found himself turning towards Baptiste on the bench, until his thigh pressed against Baptiste’s and he could feel the gentle humidity of Baptiste’s breath on his cheek.

‘Yes,’ he said inarticulately. Baptiste’s breath caught.

‘I was hoping you’d say that.’ Remarkably, Baptiste turned and slid off the piano bench onto the floor. There wasn’t a lot of room for him down there.

‘Are you—’

‘ _Really_ friendly,’ said Baptiste. He put his hands on the inside of Siebren’s thighs. ‘Can I?’

There was no doubt what he was talking about. Siebren wanted to say yes, and he also wanted Baptiste to never stop touching his legs and looking at him. He wanted to preserve this moment before it was ruined. The two of them, in a room with a piano, talking like friends. The proximity. 

_Come on,_ he told himself. _He’s offering it to you on a plate._ Or fresh out of the peel, like a ripe orange.

‘Yes,’ he said, very low.

When Siebren had touched the essence of the universe, he had experienced everything at once. Time, space, reality, unreality. Matter and antimatter. They told him that it was why he was strange, now. It had given him unique abilities. Those abilities were very clear and present, but when Siebren thought back to The Event, as he privately called it, he had only the image of a swirl of inky purple-black and the floating sense of his own body revolving within that spiral.

He had something of that feeling now, as Baptiste unzipped Siebren’s pants. Made space for his hand. Then the hand was on him, warm and confident, and Siebren’s body was responding. He was hard almost immediately and he thought that was it. It couldn’t get any better than the slow, persistent ache of arousal and Baptiste’s hand around him. 

And then Baptiste licked his lower lip and put his mouth on Siebren. Just a little at first, and then more, and deeper. His tongue was playing Siebren with its own kind of rhythm, round in circles. It was so good it almost hurt. It was almost too much. 

Siebren gripped the edge of the piano bench and closed his eyes. If he looked at Baptiste’s mouth, it would be over very soon. Instead, he listened. Listened to the obscene slick noises, and the quiet sounds Baptiste was making in his throat. The wet gasps for breath. How Baptiste could do this without choking, Siebren couldn’t imagine. He could feel the ridged edge of Baptiste’s hard palate, and the flex of his throat. If he looked now he knew he would be able to see Baptiste’s throat moving, accommodating him.

If he looked—Siebren sucked in a breath. He couldn’t think like this. It was too much. If he looked—or if someone walking by were to look.

‘Baptiste,’ he said, not expecting a response. Yet Baptiste moaned around him, and his grip tightened just enough, oh, the perfect amount.

Siebren came with a gasp, the universe turning around him. The piano hummed with the resonant frequency of its strings, two hundred and thirty of them buzzing as Siebren’s abilities charged the air around them. It vibrated with an energy almost strong enough to damage it. Siebren could hear it, and he could feel it through his feet and through the piano bench. He heard Baptiste swallow.

‘That’s flattering,’ he said throatily against Siebren’s belly. 

‘It frightens people,’ said Siebren, killing the mood, saying the wrong thing again.

‘I’m made of sterner stuff.’ Baptiste’s knees cracked as he got up off the floor, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He was wearing his uniform pants and they were doing nothing to hide the fact that he was as hard as Siebren had been. Remembering that his own pants were undone, Siebren fumbled to dress himself again.

‘Did you want—?’ he began, gesturing vaguely to Baptiste’s body.

‘I told you, I’m very friendly. The giving type.’ Baptiste laughed again, that deep, good laugh. ‘Next time, Siebren.’

‘At the piano?’ Siebren asked, shocked.

‘If it does it for you. Or, you know, you could just come to my room instead.’ Then he leaned down and, cupping the side of Siebren’s face, kissed his temple.

‘Oh,’ said Siebren. ‘I will, Baptiste.’ He found himself breaking into a smile. A small one, a wondering one. He looked up at Baptiste, whose eyes were doing their joyful crinkle again. With one hand, he tried a chord on the piano. And another, brightening it up. ‘A merengue, you said.’

‘A merengue. Don’t forget. And maybe I’ll sing for you next time. If my mouth isn’t full.’

‘A merengue,’ Siebren said to himself again. The music was coming together in his head now, yes, the beat of it something like a salsa. He touched the keys with more confidence. 

They would play it together, the two of them, in rhythm—a duet.


End file.
